I am a web designer and developer but I don't know any scripting language. And I am looking for a robust web development WYSIWYG like software that can write code for me automatically in javascript and php.
Id go with dreamweaver because is has the design view as well as the code view. Aptana is more for developers rather than designers and developers. Dreamweaver will write some code for you (and you'll find out later that its crap!) so it'll get you used to the languages.
I used to work in Dreamweaver when I first started but now I can't get enough of Aptana.
WYSIWYG will only generate HTML page and a little JS at best. You need to know coding to offer interactive functionality.
You'll hate this answer but take some time to learn PHP and JavaScript - I stated off as a designer and tried to avoid code. Then instead of copying and pasting code hoping that it works I got to grips with the fundamentals of both languages and realised how easy it is and how there was nothing to fear.
Good resources are w3schools.com, stackoverflow (obviously) and my fav JavaScript books are DOM scripting by Jeremy Keith and Jeffrey Sambells and once you feel confident to learn some of the more advanced features of JavaScript, JavaScript Patterns by Stoyan Stefanov was helpful to me.
Like I say this doesn't actually answer your question. However Dreamweaver automatically produced a 700 line JS file for an interface action I wanted, using the resources above I did the same in an unobtrusive manner with 16 lines of code!
I realize this is an old thread but im sure the debate still rages on LOL... i've been a devote DW user for many many many years (Like since 2000 or so). I am a coder/developer... I never use DW auto complete or anything like that. Primarily the reason i've stuck with it is because my FTP is RIGHT THERE!... HOWEVER, LOL, I just ran into a problem where I needed to recover a file (all these years and i've never needed this feature). Anyway I just ran across this thread Recover Deleted Files in Aptana Studio 3? "By default Aptana Studio stores a history of up to 7 days if the file was within a project."... I guess i can live without having my ftp right there in the same program and just use filezilla. sigh lol. Also DW doesnt recognize keys which is a big let down but yea... anyway... I just started using Aptana Studio 3 so I hope I fall in love with it quickly lol I'm building my projects now :P
Well, just to clarify some stuff. Aptana does have ftp, and i even think it's easier to use than dreamweaver's ftp module...
I'm in a bit of a pickle at work. My department designs a number of internal systems for the company, mostly data-reporting related. We have less than 10 true content pages that actually need to be maintained by a human. These pages were written in PHP and maintained through Dreamweaver by a non-technical staff members - they used the design editor, and avoided the code as much as possible. There were issues, but overall it worked well.
Recently this project was updated and converted to a ASP.NET Web Application. This resulted in some architecture changes, making the content harder to edit with a WYSIWIG editor (it's now revision controlled, it's compiled and thus must be re-deployed after modifications are made, etc.). We sort of assumed that the staff member who had been maintaining it would just continue to do so, now using Visual Studio's "Design" mode instead of Dreamweaver's. We were mistaken, and it isn't an option for technical and non-technical reasons.
The staff member will not be touching any HTML - we need a WYSIWIG editor (this is a requirement we were handed...no arguing with them over that). I started looking at CMS', mainly Drupal, but after a bit of playing around I see that content 'Blocks' don't really have a WYSIWIG editor, instead expecting HTML. Is this true for all CMS'? Is there some easy-to-setup CMS out there that comes with a WYSIWIG editor? Does anyone have any other ideas? Don't care what language it's in, I'll make something work.
This really isn't my area of expertise - I do application development primarily, with an occasional web front-end. Not sure I'm even asking the right question, but hoping someone can help.
WordPress makes use of TinyMCE, and it works pretty well for some NON techie clients of mine. You can write (PHP) scripts that will call the WP functions and pull the page content.
Back to the point, I have found the backend of WordPress to be usable and friendly to a good mix of people. We often use it for a backend and build something completely custom for the frontend, and have had good results.
http://www.cushycms.com/
They let you add easy WYSIWYG capability to any website, regardless of the technology used.
You just add a tag once in your source file, and let your users go to CushyCMS.com to add text content.
I am by no means a CMS expert, but I believe SiteCore might suit your needs. It is a .NET system, built on top of ASP.NET, and from my limited experience with it, the UI for business users is very usable.
Take a look on Joomla. It includes WYSIWYG editor. It is much simpler than Drupal
As Frank points out, TinyMCE is a great option, in fact you use it here :D. Have a look at some examples: http://tinymce.moxiecode.com/examples/full.php
The good point is that TinyMCE is just javascript, so in theory you can add it to any CMS, or in fact to any HTML form.
Also, I think is the default input method for Joomla if you are interested.
I would recommend CKEditor (the successor to the FCKEditor), I haven't used FCKEditor in ASP .NET code, but have used it in PHP with a lot of success. I haven't gotten around to converting old code to CKEditor, but plan to in the future.
If this is something where you can load HTML files from your server that has FTP access...a quick and dirty solution I have used is CushyCMS.com, you supply ftp credentials and hook up the files and they are good to go. Non-technical customers of mine have liked the editor a lot. It allows you to specifically say what you want edited and what you don't.
In PHP the way I usually architect using CushyCMS is to have the main page do a require_once on the content page and the content page has the HTML block that I want them to be able to edit.
so the code looks like this:
<?php
//...other code
require_once("page_content.php");
//...other code
?>
where page_content.php looks something like this:
<div id="whatever" class="cushycms">
editable text here
</div>
Hope this helps.
I used to think that for user friendly editing, you need a WYSIWYG editor, such as the TinyMCE that has already mentioned. Not any more.
Editing content in such a rich text editor is not very handy. Very often you end up messing up the content, and either does a technically savvy person have to come to help, or you have to switch to CODE view (= HTML) to clean up the mess.
Now I'd be far more inclined to use something Markdown, like this site (and Reddit) uses. For most purposes, you don't need rich text, and it is just as handy a WYSIWYG tool. If you need a few rich text touches, like making some text bold or italic, this works quite easily too. Lists, either numbered or bulletted, are a snap. And making links... Those WYSIWYG tools always seem to be able to mess it up in ways you can't even imagine.
Plus, this way, the resulting HTML is always clean and minimal, and it's extremely hard for the user to mess up.
What about Expression Web? It is made to edit ASP.NET web pages, and can integrate with TFS
Ok, I've seen a few posts that mention a few other posts about not using SP wikis because they suck.
Since we are looking at doing our wiki in SP, I need to know why we shouldn't do it for a group of 6 automation-developers to document the steps in various automated processes and the changes that have to be made from time to time.
Here are some caveats I came across that will vanish if you use a wiki other than Sharepoint.
Sharepoint lets you create tons of separate wikis, but I'd recommend having one big wiki for everything. My company made a bunch of little wikis for each project/feature, but only admins can create the individual wikis, so if I want to write about something that isn't doesn't match one of the predefined categories, I have to find a manager to create the wiki first.
Secondly, if you use Sharepoint make sure everyone on your staff only uses IE, since Firefox doesn't support the WYSIWIG editor. This is a good thing for most wikis, but makes collaborating difficult in Sharepoint. Imagine editing auto-generated HTML in a tiny little box all day.
Third, try to write up your project documentation in the wiki and resist the temptation to upload Word docs to the Sharepoint library. No point in writing up all your docs twice and watching things get more and more out of sync.
Finally, image support in Sharepoint wikis is terrible. You have to add a file to a document library somewhere and type in the URL. My images were forever getting deleted because they don't seem to make much sense out of context.
I have a much more positive view of Microsoft's Sharepoint Wiki. In many ways it reminds me of FrontPage 98 -- and that was an unfairly maligned product.
The comment about using a list is misguided. Sharepoint Wikis ARE Sharepoint lists, in which each page is a list item with an HTML attachment.
It's true that you can't link into a page, but if the pages are short I don't see that as a problem. SP Wiki makes it very easy to have short pages.
You can manipulate the Wiki attributes from access 2008 if you wish, and you can add attributes to the wiki list items as desired. For example -- do you want categories? Just add them by editing the list. Want specific views? of list items. Create them too.
There's real genius in the way Microsoft built their Wiki framework atop Sharepoint lists -- which are undeniablly well done.
The TRUE drawback of Sharepoint Wiki was mentioned by famerchris. The approach to image management is surprisingly awful. It's such a serious problem that you should consider other Wikis for this reason alone.
There is a convoluted workaround that I use. It takes advantage of the superb Sharepoint support and image editing integrated with Windows Live Writer.
Create a SP blog that will hold the images that will be referenced in the wiki.
Use Windows Live Writer to post to the wiki-image-blog. Drop your image into WLW, resize it as needed, etc. If you like, use WLW to write your image associated wiki text first draft as well.
After you post to the Wiki, copy and paste image and text into the Wiki editor rich text field.
This takes suprisingly little time, far less than any other option I've read of. I admit, it is convoluted.
Other than the image problems I'm pleased and impressed with the product. If only Microsoft had thought harder about images ... if only ...
The default wiki included with Sharepoint doesn't support common wiki features well at all. There is no way to edit a single section of a page, and no way to link directly to a particular section on another page. The backend is in HTML so you lose the ability to edit in plaintext using simple syntax. The diff feature can't span multiple versions. Poor cross browser support of WYSIWYG editing. No way to auto-insert a table of contents...
There are, however, other wiki add-ins for Sharepoint which I can't categorically dismiss, for instance Confluence makes an add-in for Sharepoint. I haven't evaluated this software myself, and Confluence is somewhat expensive ($1,200 for 25 user license) although if you are already on Sharepoint I sense large corporate coffers :P. There also appear to be some free add-ins like CKS Enhanced Wiki but that appears to have a lot of the same problems mentioned above.
We run into this topic all the time, and the first question I have taken to asking people is "Why do you need a wiki"? Almost always the answers are things "ease of editing", "multiple contributors", and "Word is to heavyweight". Very rarely have we seen anyone ask for what I consider to be uniquely wiki-like features (special "magic" markup, fine grained version history showing changes, etc). Also, they usually want some kind of categorization of things, not just completely free-form pages.
In the SharePoint world these things should scream "list" at you if you've been working with the tool for a while. There is basically no particular reason to use a wiki for these knowledge base-style applications, especially since "ease of editing" usually directly conflicts with the idea of learning a special markup language for most user. Through a couple of rich-text columns in there, and you're all set. If you really don't like the built-in rich-text editor (yes the image uploading process is clunky and it doesn't work in Firefox), have someone in your organization go drop the 8 Benjamins and go get the RadEditor for SharePoint. It should pretty much handle those concerns.
Generally once we've gotten over the "but it needs to be a wiki" dogma, we've had pretty good customer reception to just using lists. In some cases, where a little more of a page templating facility was required we turned to using the WCM features of MOSS, which requires a little more up-front thought about templates, but also has a better out of the box experience for things like content snippets and image handling.
Because the default implementation is not a wiki, it is an HTML editor.
If you've used a wiki before you'll know the difference. Just look at "Your answer" at the bottom of this page to see the difference. You use markup in a wiki, which is relatively easy to read and edit. Formatted HTML completely obscures what is written.
My two cents worth as a wiki content creator and super-user, rather than an administrator or developer:
I am currently editing a document in Sharepoint Wiki as I type this, and it is by far the worst editor I have ever come across. To be precise, I'm using Sharepoint Foundation 2010 (previously known as WSS), editing pages using IE 9.
To sum up the problems I've faced: When creating wiki content you want to concentrate on the content and the wiki engine should be so easy to use as to be almost invisible. With Sharepoint that is not the case. I really struggle with the pseudo-WYSIWYG editor, having to fix frequent formatting problems.
I estimate that I'm about 15% less productive writing wiki content with Sharepoint than I am with ScrewTurn or Wikimedia because I have to deal with the formatting issues. If I spend a day writing wiki pages I would lose about an hour trying to fix formatting issues.
For background: I've created four internal wikis at our company - the first in Wikimedia, the wiki engine behind Wikipedia, the next two in ScrewTurn, and a final one in Sharepoint. In each wiki I've written about 50-100 pages.
In both ScrewTurn and Wikimedia the editor looks fairly primitive - a plain text editor that uses simple wiki mark-up codes for formatting. Each has a row of buttons that can apply mark-up codes for simple things like bold and italic formatting, and to create links, so beginners do not need to learn the mark-up codes by heart. While the editors look plain they turn out to be really simple to use, especially for fixing formatting problems.
Sharepoint Wiki, on the other hand, looks slick but is terrible for editing. Instead of using a plain text editor with wiki mark-up it has a WYSIWYG editor that looks much more sophisticated than other wiki editors. However it has personality, an evil one. It frequently adds blank lines or changes the colour of text. When I select text to format then go to the Markup Styles dropdown to format it, sometimes the act of selecting an item from the dropdown list deselects the selected text so the formatting applies to text at a random location. Inserting text copied from Word sometimes causes the editor to double or triple up on blank lines between paragraphs at other places on the page. There appears to be no easy way of creating a table, apart from writing HTML.
The biggest problem about the editor, however, is that you can't easily see what is going on behind the scenes so it's difficult to fix it. Yes, it's possible to edit the page's HTML but that really defeats the purpose of a wiki.
The overall impression I get as a user, is that this is alpha-level code that has been knocked up by a summer intern. I know Foundation is the free version so perhaps I get what we've paid for but I cannot believe a professional software company put out this product.
For a group of 6 people that will be making "every now and then" edits, the built-in wiki will be fine.
The Sharepoint Wiki is essentially a list of Static HTML Pages, with the only Wiki-feature being [[article]] links. No Templates, No Categories, nothing.
We ended up having a separate MediaWiki and only use the Sharepoint wiki for text-based content that does not need much layout.
Don't forget the Community Kit for Sharepoint - Enhanced Wiki Edition. This adds some features to the out of the box version.
Before the rant, here is my overall experience with SharePoint as a wiki.
It is a poorly implemented feature that failed becouse there was a fundemental lack of investigation into what current wiki environments provide. That is why it failed in it's editor and why it misses on points like: tagging, history comparison, and poorly generated html code.
You need to skip it and get something else that does the job better and link to it from SharePoint.
Having production experience with both products, I'd recommend ScrewTurn over SharePoint.
see edit history for rant
My company rolled out sharepoint recently, and I have to say my user experience was Very Bad. And I'm not just saying I was apprehensive to using it: I went in with an open mind and tried it, and many things just felt like they didn't really work right.
The reasons Luke mentioned more or less cover it.
Why wouldn't you consider using something else like Screwturn Wiki which Jeff donated to a short while ago? I haven't used Screwturn myself, but it is free and open source, and may be a faster lightweight solution for what you need.
We looked at Sharepoint for a department wiki a few months ago. Even though we're primarily an MS shop, we went with DokuWiki. Open-source, so easy to keep up to date, great plugins, and a file-based back end.
I would also temper the ratings of the OOB wiki and its lack of functionality with the technical level of the authors here.
I agree that the SP wiki might qualify in name only - certainly when compared to some more robust offerings - but remember as an admin - your primary success is determined by end user adoption. In short - for every feature that a wiki like Confluence adds, it also adds user education, syntax, etc.
While I would love SP wiki to have more "wiki-like" - there is a certain, undescribable satisfaction you can take when your CIO adds an entry in the company wiki - or you are recognized by a group of administrative assistants who find the new wiki "revolutionary".
In short - the built in functionality may be lacking to the jaded eyes of us tech professionals, but to the technologically naive, its pretty easy to train on, and can expose them to a technology they may have heard of but could never (before this) understand or imagine using.
I've played very briefly with SharePoint Wiki Plus. It's a third-party extension that adds features to the SharePoint Wiki. For serious wiki users then you probably need something more than the SharePoint provided Wiki - either via an extension or a dedicated Wiki product.
Maybe try http://wordtosharepoint.codeplex.com/ for migrating your Word content to SharePoint? It takes care of linking images and most other things.
Screwturn is wicked awesome - and it is C# / .Net.
Sharepoint 2010 is supposed to have better wiki features, and there is always the community kit of sharepoint.
If you are able to leave the Sharepoint Wiki behind - you could always head over to the http://www.wikimatrix.org to find the wiki that works for you.
I fully concur with the above (Keng). Whatever that thing is within SharePoint (currently using 2010), it is NOT a Wiki by a long shot.
I am implementing an automated documenting solution, where I extract config and other info (like perldoc markup) from source code and XML config files. It inserts the info in a set of DokuWIKI pages, complete with formatting markup (including tables). It comes out perfectly formatted and works with a couple of tens of lines of perl, includes internal links to manually edited static doc pages, and support for namespaces so I can have my information logically organised. There is no way I could do that in SharePoint (sigh - company direction)...
The best I can do is try to make DokuWIKI template resemble sort of the SharePoint site (to keep the look and feel similar) and link out of SharePoint. :-(